Engaging Students in Textbook Reading

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Cherlyn Anderson on September 14, 2009 at 2:05pm

You may want to look into some of Kylene Beers' materials. There are a lot of strategies posted at www.allamericareads.org Look under Lesson plans.

A book I am currently reading is Creating Literacy Rich Schools for Adolescents by Gay Ivey and Douglas Fisher. Chapter 2, "Transportable and Transparent Strategies for Content Literacy Instruction" shares many strategies.

Permalink Reply by Matthew Stern on November 15, 2010 at 2:17pm

A great technique I've used is the SQ4R

Survey the text and images first to connect to prior knowledge
Questions - turn each heading in the text into a question providing a more manageable and concrete purpose for reading
Read the text (and make adjustments to your question so that you CAN answer it)
Record answers to your questions
Review - students will answer a few prepared questions, or summarize main points based upon their reading
Reflect - allows students to ask follow-up questions if necessary.

It takes some practice for students to get this down, but it works very well in my Social Studies class. Once they have the skill they can generalize it and apply it in other situations, which is the real goal with literacy education.

see attached file

Attachments:

• SQ4R.doc, 58 KB

Permalink Reply by Todd Anderson on March 10, 2011 at 2:31pm

Are you familiar with Silver and Strong's Thoughtful Ed. Strategies?  I love to use Reading for Meaning, New American Notebook, and Vocabulary Notebook from them.

Permalink Reply by Vivian Barker on June 24, 2011 at 12:37pm

I use page protectors over the text book page. Cut a protector to where it will easily fits over one page and coach students how to find main ideas of subheadings and imprtant facts. This technique is used at the beginning of the year and I show students, by allowing them to mark on the page protector, what is important. Imagine it being like them able to use higlighter with protection. They then take notes from their "markings" in their notebooks.

Permalink Reply by Mary Henton on July 1, 2011 at 12:10pm

This is an interesting idea, Vivian. It seems like a technique that would help ELL students, also. Highlight new words or the narrative clues to a word's definition?